The past two years offer a window into the future of Vermont's climate, one that is warmer, wetter and far more unpredictable than anything we've had in the past. How will the state adjust?

Feb. 3, 2013

James Donegan produces maple syrup from his sugarbush at Trillium Farm in Hinesburg. He is concerned that warming and erratic weather patterns brought on by climate change will adversely affect maple syrup production. He visited his sugarhouse on Thursday, January 24, 2012. Donegan taps with buckets, gathers with horses, and fires his evaporator with wood. He guesses that his sugarhouse may be as much as 200 years old. / GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS

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Free Press Staff Writer

MONTPELIER — The three Vermont legislative committees picked the right day last week to hold a joint hearing on the effects of climate change on businesses. • Some people were late after having to pick their way through the remnants of overnight freezing rain. As the hearing progressed, temperatures outdoors rose toward record heights. Weather forecasters talked of flood and wind alerts, and warned of plunging temperatures the next day. • The consensus among the 40 or so people who testified at Wednesday’s hearing was not so much that we must adapt to climate change in the future, but that we’re being forced to adapt already, and we must continue. • The most challenging part of the adaptation is not the warmer, wetter climate we’re increasingly experiencing. What is particularly vexing are the wild, odd swings in temperature and precipitation — the kind that were going on outside the Vermont Statehouse as lawmakers and witnesses spoke — that make planning, producing and stability more difficult.

The worry is that the challenges businesses, farmers, and many other Vermonters face will intensify.

“The climate is going to change fast. I hope we are all able to adjust,” said State Sen. David Zuckerman, P/D-Chittenden, who was at the hearing testifying in his role as a farmer, not a legislator.

By far the wettest year on record in Vermont was 2011, which was marked by repeated, destructive floods. Late April floods trashed the Lamoille River valley and other sections of Vermont. Lake Champlain inundated shorelines for weeks in the spring and early summer. Flash floods wiped out roads and damaged or destroyed homes and businesses across central and northern Vermont. And then Tropical Storm Irene unleashed the state’s worst disaster since 1927.

Last year was drier but was by far the warmest on record in Vermont — as if the climate of Hartford, Conn., abruptly packed up and moved to Burlington.

Skiers and other outdoor enthusiasts mourned an almost snow-free winter.

“For me, 2012 will be remembered as the year when you really couldn’t ski, no matter how much you wanted to,” nationally known climate activist Bill McKibben of Ripton wrote in an email exchange with the Burlington Free Press.

The experience was in line with studies issued a few years ago that climate change would render cross-country skiing and snowmobiling extinct in northern New England by mid-century, McKibben wrote.

Midsummer-like warmth with temperatures in the 80s cut short Vermont’s 2012 maple sugaring season in the spring. Intense thunderstorms, feeding off the persistent heat and humidity in May, June, July and August, caused widespread wind damage and unleashed local, intense flash floods.

The warmth had direct health effects, too, contributing to the spread of illnesses such as EEE and Lyme disease, McKibben noted.

Chances are 2013 will end up as neither the wettest nor the hottest year on record. And maybe it will be calmer than the past two years. But 2011 and 2012 offered a window into the future of Vermont’s climate, one that is warmer, wetter and far more unpredictable than anything we’ve had in the past.

If the first month of 2013 is any indication, that new unpredictability already is here to stay.

McKibben was in Montpelier on Wednesday to offer his thoughts on the impending threats of climate change in Vermont. The Statehouse hearing that morning provided a prelude to his talk, a chance for Vermonters to discuss the variety of ways they are struggling with and adapting to climate change.

The impact

House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Chairman William Botzow, D-Pownal, said he was surprised to hear of the far-reaching effects climate change has in Vermont.

Among the examples discussed at the Statehouse:

• Green Mountain Power has blown through its entire $6 million annual storm repair budget for the fiscal year, which started Oct. 1. CEO Mary Powell blamed an increase in the power of storms that have been blowing through the state.

• Vermont’s maple-sugar season starts and average of 8.6 days earlier, and ends 11.6 days earlier, than in did in the 1960s, said Tim Perkins, director of the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center in Underhill.

• The efforts to build bigger, stronger culverts, bridges in roads in the face of intensifying floods are already well underway, said Sue Minter of the Vermont Agency of Transportation. But other issues are coming to the fore in the face of warmer winters.

“We’re having more mud seasons, and that’s putting a strain on our budgets,” Minter said.

• The business model for most Vermont ski resorts has shifted so that they market themselves as four-season resorts, in part because climate change has made good skiing conditions less predictable, said Megan Smith, commissioner of the Department of Tourism and Marketing.

• Farm harvests have gotten more unpredictable and sometimes seriously out of season. Zuckerman said he had a January leek harvest this year for the first time in memory.

Ken Albert of Shelburne Vineyards said he is toying with the idea of growing Reisling grapes, a variety once considered too delicate for Vermont’s cold climate.

And East Montpelier farmer Richard Hall said his father’s generation in the 1970s harvested three cuts of hay per year, but now, he often has five cuttings. The growing season is longer, summers are generally warmer and often wetter, so grass grows more vigorously and for a longer period of time.

A Vermont tradition

“If you don’t like the weather in Vermont, wait a minute; it’ll change,” goes the old saw.

It’s true: The weather is notoriously fickle. Veterans of Vermont winters know the temperature can rise from 20 below to 40 above and back down to zero in just a few days.

Last week might have been more extreme than the usual wintertime big swings. Temperatures started out in the teens and 20s below zero across most of Vermont on Jan. 24. That’s about average strength for a Vermont cold wave. Within a week, it was in the 50s, setting records highs. The oddest part of the warmth was that temperatures stayed in the 50s overnight. That kind of nighttime warmth is more typical of early June.

The extremes are becoming more extreme.

And because of this, it has dawned on people that instead of planning for the need to adapt one day to climate change, they’ve already adapted. That means they have to stay on their feet and keep pivoting to whatever new weather realities crop up.

Mary Powell, of Green Mountain Power, said longtime employees are stunned by the ferocity of storms that cause havoc with the electrical distribution system, which serves 72 percent of Vermonters

“The weather events are more freakish and more frequent than most of us appreciate,” she said. “It feels like there’s no normal storm event anymore.”

The utility has responded by trimming more trees further away from power lines than in the past to stave off storm damage, and bolstering the durability of its equipment, she said.

Ken Albert, the Shelburne Vineyard owner, said it’s sometimes hard to figure out how best to manage his grape production in the face of erratic conditions.

“Overall, there’s more risk than we’ve ever had before,” he said.

In recent years, particularly warm early spring weather coaxes vines into budding, but then freezes a few days later threaten the season’s grape production, he said. Some years, such as 2011, are so wet that mold and pests cut into harvests. Other years, including dry, warm 2012, create crops that rival those in California’s Napa Valley, Albert added.

All this means Albert has a harder time planning in advance which wines to produce.

Benefits

If not for the extremes in the weather, and the inherent troubles that come along, a warmer Vermont would seem to have a number of benefits, too. Home and business heating costs would fall. And few people enjoy bouts of weather at 20 and 30 degrees below zero.

Richard Hall, the East Montpelier farmer, said the warm 2012 was a boon to his business. He planted feed corn earlier, and it grew luxuriously in the hot, humid summer. Five cuts of hay rather than three meant he didn’t have to buy as much feed for his milking cows. “We’re getting more yield,” he said.

For tourists, spring is becoming a better option in Vermont, said Megan Smith, the Vermont tourism commissioner. Events that were out of the question in what decades ago usually was a chilly and wet May now unfold in comfortably warm weather before Memorial Day, she said.

Despite the new uncertainties, Albert, the vineyard owner, said a generally warmer Vermont climate in the future would help the state’s wine industry grow, and prompt growers to experiment with a wider variety of grapes.

But other industries suffer in the added warmth. Already, climate change might have been a factor in declining membership in the Vermont Association of Snow Travelers, which administers a network of snowmobile trails in the state.

Alexis Nelson, the group’s executive director, said membership in VAST has fallen by half to around 16,000. She blamed the lack of snow in recent winters for most of the dwindling membership.

Ski resorts and maple sugaring are among the Vermont industries that also are hit hard by a warming world.

Long-term threats

So far, the earlier, shorter maple-sugaring season in Vermont has not affected production, said Tim Perkins of the Proctor Research center.

Techniques such as better tubing and taps have increased production. Demand is strong, because more people want natural sweeteners.

In Hinesburg, third-generation sugar maker James Donegan, 32, said the sugaring season has become more erratic. Still, he hasn’t noticed a discernible trend in production, though the swings are wider. Last year was the worst he could remember; the year before was the best.

Another problem, possibly caused by warmer weather, is the proliferation of annoyance vegetation such as buckthorn and honeysuckle.

“One thing we’ve started working on is invasive species,” Donegan said. “They’ve really taken off. I’m concerned those things will take over the understory.”

Donegan said his long-term worry is not about him, but about future generations that want to use his hillside sugarbush.

Perkins said Donegan is right to worry.

“The long-range prediction is considerably less favorable,” Perkins said. “We will experience some loss in production due to climate change.”

Eventually, decades from now, the climate that supports Vermont’s hardwood forests of maple, birch and beech will move north, giving us more of an oak, pine and hickory forest, he said. Eventually, maple syrup, the food most associated with Vermont, might no longer be produced here.

Amy Seidl, a Huntington ecologist and author who has written extensively on climate change and how humans must adapt to it, said reaction to Vermont’s hotter, wetter and stormier future needs go beyond building better bridges, adjusting farming practices and shifting the focus of industries such as tourism.

Seidl said she sees a need for social resilience. That means neighbors pool their resources in the face of climate-induced changes or disasters. That might mean one household helping a neighbor with transportation if the driveway washes out. Or, another neighbor can help with food if a garden gets wiped out.

This type of thinking extends to such necessities as utilities, Seidl said. Instead of a wide-ranging electrical distribution system that is prone to widespread power failures, perhaps communities could invest in smaller, closed electrical systems that is less prone to disasters and are more easily reachable for repairs, she said.

Seidl said she is optimistic overall about the ability of people to adapt as the world’s climate becomes weirder, warmer and wetter in the coming decades.

Her optimism fades, though, when thoughts turn to reducing the carbon emissions that are causing the problem in the first place.

“I am discouraged by the lack of political will,” Seidl said. “We still lack the policies to change what’s driving the effect.”